Will pilots become obsolete?

[monty_burns]

i'm a wannabe doing my ppl right now and to continue on and go commercial. i'd like to hear opinions about whether or not pilots will become obsolete by new technologies. i've heard of nasa working on sky-highways that would work with planes equipped with collision-avoidance detection systems that would (supposedly) make everyone be able to fly and not require lots of training.

if i spend tens of thousands of dollars on training and give up my decent job for a career as a pilot, what are the chances that ten-twenty years down the road i find myself either replaced by a computer chip or effectively put to work making sure the computer doesn't burn out while it flies the plane and makes the decisions?

[Polar_stereographic]

Got to say, that it can aleady happen technically, but I just can't see Joe public buying into a totaly automated a/c. Note that there is a diference between automation assisting the crew and totaly automated flight, but I presume you are refering to a flight without pilots in the front seats.

I'm not loosing any sleep over this.

PS

[Hand Solo]

Frankly I don't think it can happen technically already. That line usually comes from 'experts' who've never flown anything bigger than a kite. Anyone whos sat and watched as the autopilot messes it up yet again will know not to trust it. I certainly don't. Furthermore, an automatic aircraft will only follow instructions, no matter how stupid they are, so whos giving them the instructions? What if weather makes the original plan unsuitable. What if there's a technical failure and the autopilot drops out ( which is often its first response to any mechanical failure). Who'll make the decisions on board, because computers only follow instructions. Who'll pay for the vast amount of spares required to make the aircraft servicable, given that most aircraft can only despatch with equipment u/s due to there being a competent person on board to oversee the operation. And given that only about 20% of the job of a professional airline pilot is actually flying, whose going to perform the other 80% of the tasks? I think we'll gain widespread passenger acceptance of a pilotless aircraft long before we have the technology to make worldwide, pilotless aircraft operations sufficently safe and cost-effective.

[Wee Weasley Welshman]

It won't happen. You could do it but frankly pilots are cheaper than implementing the changes would be.

Plus none of the current aircraft could do it and they will be around for another 30 - 40 years.

WWW

[scroggs]

No way it will happen until Artificial Intelligence is good enough to make critical decisions in emergencies, and passengers are prepared to fly with no human at the controls. I'd guess that's 50-100 years away.

It is specious to compare aircraft with, for instance, automatic trains. Such vehicles simply come to a halt if the automatics fail, warning the human system controllers who can then make the appropriate decisions to safeguard all the passengers on the system. Coming to a halt is not an option in an aircraft!

As Hand Solo says, automatics can, as yet, only follow pre-programmed instructions. They cannot anticipate problems, or assess the consequences of a choice of actions. The only alternative to a pilot on the aircraft is one on the ground, flying the aircraft through a datalink. I think you'll find the flying public very reluctant to trust an aircraft that the pilot won't get into!

[Chuck Ellsworth]

Scroggs:

Coming to a halt can be an option, but not a desired one as it happens so fast. :D :D :D

Cat Driver:

................
:D The hardest thing about flying is knowing when to say no.:D

[ILS27R]

The airline industry is consumer driven and will simply not take the gamble of introducing pilotless aircraft to the skies. The technology is already there- for instance the RAF operate pilotless drone aircraft already. However, like WWW says the infra structure which would be needed not to mention all the safety critical systems and the numbers of staff required would rule it out, in cost terms anyway- even if cargo aircraft were to be operated this way. One thing is to operate the odd pilotless aircraft from a remote site, but its quite another thing to operate day- in, day-out whole fleets of aircraft without pilots. Also any electronic device is liable to have its data corrupted by high energy cosmic rays- which there is no shielding for- so even if scientists invented true artificial intelligence it would be doubtful it could totally run an aircraft. There was a case a few years back of an automatic train somewhere near the Alps (I think?) that kept on going out of control. Teams of physicists and engineers were called in to sort the problem. Eventually they found that cosmic rays were actually changing binary digits within the train's computers.

I have a question for the rest though. Do you think avionics has reached its limit more-or-less? Where could the engineers go from here? Do you think it will ever get to the stage that a single button is pressed that will enable the aircraft to taxi, take-off cruise and land without the pilots intervention,- only during normal ops mind you??

It would been interesting to have asked the signalers, navigators and flight engineers back in the 50's and early 60's what they thought the future prospects of their job would encompass.

[FlyingForFun]

Some interesting replies here - excellent thread! :)

My own thoughts: There is no doubt that this is technically possible. As someone has already said, pilotless drone aircraft already exist. Pilots have to make many decisions, but just about all of these could be automated. Weather decisions, for example, can be made by a simple image recognition system which examines weather radar. Similar systems are already in use in the medical industry, and are generally proving to me more reliable in this industry than human operators.

The thing which many people are worried about is how a pilotless aircraft would deal with an emergency. But many emergencies are dealt with by standard operating procedures, and therefore could be programmed into a computer quite easilly. And even human pilots are often unable to successfully land an aircraft when an emergency arises which is not covered by standard procedures.

I can't see any civilian company investing in this kind of development, though, for several reasons. The main one is that the general public are not yet ready to accept pilotless aircraft. Another factor is the cost - it is currently cheaper to employ pilots than to run a complex computer and all the associated systems (especially when pilots pay for their own training!)

However, there are plenty of reasons why the military would be interested in pilotless aircraft. Fast jets are approaching, or have reached, the G-force tolerance limits of humans. The only way that manoeverability of military aircraft can be increased is to use pilotless aircraft. The weight saving from the removal of life support systems (not to mention the pilot!) is a big benefit. Another benefit (which the cynic in me says is not particularly important to the authorities) is that not having pilots means that lives are not at stake if an aircraft is shot down.

Therefore, it is possible that pilotless aircraft will be developed for military purposes. As these aircraft become more common, the cost of operating them will come down, and the public will become used to the concept. Once this happens, it's conceivable that pilotless aircraft will start being used in the civilian world. However, the life-cycle of aircraft means that even once we start to see pilotless airliners appear, it will be many years before all the "old-fashioned" aircraft will be phased out.


I believe that, one day, we will see airliners fly without pilots. But, for the reasons stated above, this will be a very very long route, and is certainly not something I'm worried about.

As with all replies on this thread, these are my personal thoughts. None of us can see the future, so none of us can say for sure. Look at all the evidence, establish how reliable the evidence is (I am an IT professional, and a private pilot working on my ATPL theory - so I feel I have a good grasp of the technology aspects of this debate, and a reasonable, although not excellent, grasp of the aviation aspects - this will give you an idea of how reliable my own ideas are!) and then make up your own mind.

FFF
-------------

[Polar_stereographic]

WWW,

wrt the costs, sure, but look at the savings. Never train a pilot again, for any a/c off the production line. I can see this of being an interest commercialy, but as I said before, it won't happen as the public will not buy into this idea.

PS

[Pegasus77]

FFF, as I'm flying the A320, which has many preprogrammed abnormal procedures, where we are required to push a button or two... I think an automated system could do that just as well. My experience however, also lies in abnormals which are not or are wrongly detected by the system.
How often we get a failure message where nothing is wrong, and sometimes we didn't get this message, where the smoke was pouring into the cockpit!

Maybe pilotless flight will be possible once, but it will take some time I guess, because IMHO the technique right now is not ready for it.

[Cypres]

Even if the technological hurdles could be overcome, which no matter what previous replies have said we are nowhere near to yet!

There is another matter of security, which is more relevant now than ever before. A conventional human crewed aircraft is an autonomous unit.
To gain control of multiple aircraft you need to have a physical presence on each aircraft. Now, if our skies were filled with pilotless aircraft, this would only be economical using a small number of ground control stations for redundancy.
Anyone wanting to create havok would only need to infiltrate / destroy a ground station. Or just interfer with with the comms link to the aircraft.
Ahh, but the aircraft are fully automatic, we don't need ground stations. Yes we do for the following reasons to list but a few:

1) Co-ordination of traffic.
2) Flight monitoring.
3) Fall back for those situations when the on-board automatics can't cope.

This is only the tip of the iceburg.

p.s. No doubt some IT professional will tell us all that we have sophistocated data encryption. There is no data encryption system to date that cannot be broken. Even if the data encryption itself is robust the transmission channel could always be jammed.

These are only some trivial observations / comments, I'm sure the real issues would be even more horrendous.

p.p.s. Keep training, it ain't gonna happen.

My speciality?
Electronics / Automation / Control / Remote Telemetry

[ILS27R]

It will be interesting to see what happens to that Sky Car prototype that is meant to fly passengers using GPS navigation along sky highways at 400mph, a few thousand feet up without the passengers even touching the controls. Seemingly they have a full working prototype. I guess though at the end of the day it all depends on whether its economically viable. Afterall jet packs were invented back in the 60's (I think?); don't know about you, but I certainly don't own one!! :)

[GonvilleBromhead]

The CAA wouldn't let it happen.

Who the hell would pay for their lunches then ???

;)

[Polar_stereographic]

Sound point GB,

but, by then they might not exist anyway.

PS

[Sean Simpson]

I have a jet pack.

I used to have two but alas my other one suffered carby icing at 500 feet and the sucker dropped me like a rock. Luckily I was over water at the time but it still hurt like hell when I splashed down, and the GJ Special was a write off. The people on the beach thought it was quite amusing though as I'd been buzzing them a few minutes earlier, Oh the humiliation.

I've installed carby heat on my remaining one and havn't had any such problems since.

Re pilotless pax aircraft - the technology will exist in the not to distant future but as stated won't be a viable proposition for 50 - 100 years, by which time molecular transporters will be the only way to travel anyway. Hmm..think I might beam over to New York for breakfast this morning, then perhaps Barcelona for a couple of beers before lunch, and I'll be back in time to watch the footy by mid avo.

Ah it's good to know some things will never change - like beer and footy .

[Hand Solo]

FFF - no disrespect intended but your response is exactly as I'd expect from an IT professional: big on technological ideas but clearly lacking any inate understanding of the operation. Its true that many problems are dealt with by SOPs, but that is a long way from saying they can be handled by a computer. A quick look at some real checklists would reveal there are often decisions to be made to determine the next course of action. I'd like to see a computer tell me whether it thought smoke smelled of fuel or not. Furthermore, these procedures generally only serve to restore the original system or provide an alternative that will allow the aircraft to remain flyable by a human pilot. In the event of major or multiple system failures the autopilot simply cannot cope with the severity or number of failures - it hasn't been designed for it and it's performance hasn't been tuned for it. There are an infinite number of events which designers will not think of and as a result the computers will not cope with. Sure the military operate pilotless aircraft, but did anyone ever see the footage of the Global Hawk going around and around and around whilst the techies on the ground try to figure out why it didn't want to land? In the end they gambled on a technique and fixed the problem, but they really didn't know what the outcome would be. Would you like to be a passenger on that? As for weather avoidance using image recognition, well all your weather radar shows you is a bit of colour. Its the interpretation which is the key and which decides on a course of action. Computers can't do that and in areas as woolly as image recognition the results of such an attempt could be very unpredictable!

If any further proof of the fallibility of computer systems is required just take a look at the continuing problems at NERC and its integrations with other ATC systems. 6 years late, vastly over budget and still relying on manual back up systems on a regular basis. If we can't create a robust ground based system for directing the aircraft how on earth can we be expected to build a robust ground based system for actually flying them? I'll take my chances with pilot error over programmer error anyday!

[englishal]

The technology is there now, but I doubt Joe Public would care to travel at 500mph at 40,000' in a machine with a mind of its own. I think the pilot will become more of a 'systems manager' in the future, becasue when it all ******s up, there will be sod all a pilot can do to keep the thing under control anyway.

They have developed and are testing neural networks for fighter aircraft ( and hence to commercial aircraft) to take decision making away from the pilot. If part of the plane is damaged, the NN decides how best to keep the aircraft under control using the remaining control surfaces / power etc. This happens transparently as far as the pilot is concerned. He still pushes the stick left to go left and right to go right, even though he may be missing an aileron or part of a wing. If the aircraft is doomed, the NN decides on its own to eject the pilot, possibly even before the pilot realises what is going on (not sure I like the sound of that).

Of course, when it all goes tits up.......:eek:

Cheers
EA

[redsnail]

It has already been done in a Boeing 737. It was controlled from the ground and it did have a flight crew on board "just in case". It did land at Sydney International. The technology is already there and has been proven. Data systems are being developed where by ATC or some other ground person can fly the aircraft using data link and other such telemetry.
I don't have all the details of this.

The person to talk to is 10W. You can find him in the ATCO forum if you don't know him. He knows all about it.

Of course, the general publics view on computers is based on the one they have at home or work. We know just how reliable they are. So, I am not worried about my profession. :D

[Firestorm]

I had to look twice: I thought the title of the thread was "Will Pilots become OBESE". Some already are. Anyway, I suppose the question is which is more falable: the man or the machine built by a man...

[ILS27R]

Flight is man's endeavor. Replace the man with a computer, aviation is finished!

[scottwiser]

The day they can get Windows 9X/200X to run without the risk of crashing is the day I'll be worried about fully-computerized airplanes. Just my 2 cents.

Scott,

[Hand Solo]

IMHO I don't think the comparisons with military technology are valid because the bottom line of a military program is that the aircraft is expendable. If it all goes wrong, you crash the thing somewhere remote and if theres a person on board they eject. Its this philosophy which allows the technology to reach an acceptable level of safety and reliability. In the case of a commercial aircraft there's no escape system, which means that you either have to design and certify for every possible eventuality, which is impossible, or you have to decide what level of risk to design to and accept that anything beyond that will lead to the loss of the aircraft. I wouldn't want to be defending that decision in court when you lose the first aircraft. Someone did mention previously the use of neural networks by the military. Again, this still relies on having an expendable aircraft with an ejection system. Neural networks are not precise things, just like the human brain. They do have some latent ability to learn, but only so much and when thats used up their performance goes downhill rapidly. They can produce varying , unpredictable results from the same input data, and just lke the human brain they can sometimes do something totally bizarre and unexpected. This form of technology is definitely not mature enough to be used in any form of safety critical application!

[monty_burns]

Thanks for everyone's ideas. I wish I had more to contribute to the discussion myself, but as mentioned in the original post, I'm only at training for my private and my knowledge of the industry is nowhere near enough to guess at how/if/when companies would try to bring in fully-automated computer flight systems.

Seems to me that I won't have to worry too much about being made obsolete. Security concerns, the limitless possibilities of things that can go wrong and possibly not accounted for in code, lifespan of aircrafts, and public unwillingness to fly an unmanned aircraft probably make the job of a human pilot fairly secure for a fair while anyway. I do wonder about the nature of the job that I would face in ten or twenty years time still.